when should a "backyard team" turn pro?
Big Piggin, sorry for taking your thread another direction.
I'd earlier interpreted your question to be "when should I start competing in sanctioned contests", when if I read correctly you were really asking "after having some success in unsanctioned comps, when should (and why wouldn't) a team stop and only compete in sanctioned comps".
I've had quite a bit of personal experience at getting both chili competitions and bbq competitions change from unsanctioned to sanctioned. Looking back, I'm not sure it helped much. Some contests did well with this change. Others didn't, and of those 1/2 have gone away, the other 1/2 went back to unsanctioned.
The reason(s) for those not doing so well is that the unsanctioned competitions had a following, mostly folks who were local back yarders and it was mostly a local competition. The organizer wanted to bring in outsiders, and to attract them they'd need to be sanctioned. *voila* it happened. Their lesson: careful what you ask for, you might get it. In every single contest like this I've seen the local teams get trounced, and in some cases very badly, in their newly sanctioned competition. Between adding rules and structure, and bringing in seasoned teams from around the area, they just weren't able to compete. Right off you say "so what". Well, those teams were kinda the heart-and-soul of the contest before this. For those where this worked, those teams stepped up their game the next year and continue to come back and get better and better every year. For those where it didnt work, those teams largely didn't come back the next year. The unique festival atmosphere that they brought with them is and was GONE.
What I'm saying is this: for many of those teams they have no real desire to compete outside of their world. They enjoy the venues that they cook in and have no desire to beat Myron some day. They are having fun and enjoying it this way and probably wouldn't enjoy it any other way. Mind you; it's not me, but I surely appreciate that this is what they enjoy and to try to change it is likely to produce undesired results (in my experience).
Verdict is still out with one of my more recent converts. They'd been doing a GBAesque competition for years, before GBA existed. They were assisted by MBN folks, and had finals and everything, but no on-site, so it was much like GBA. They had 3 local teams that pretty much dominated year in and year out. I got to judge (being of the MBN ilk) every year for them and I enjoyed seeing the BBQ get better and better every year. Well, last year they went sanctioned, GBA. Sadly, none of their core 3 teams that had done so well before made finals in anything. Matter of fact, only 1 of the teams got a call at all. It was ugly... I mentioned ahead of time, with warnings etc. to the organizer and the head cook for one of the teams that this is a whole new level of competition; WAY up from what they were accustomed to seeing. They still didnt perform very well. They're having the competition sanctioned again this year, but I wonder where it goes down the road. Jury still out on this one.
